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Beck Center for the Arts

Beck Center for the Arts in Lakewood, Ohio, is a non-profit, performing arts and arts education organization. It is the largest theater and arts center on Cleveland's West Shore, educating and entertaining over 65,000 people per year. On its 3½ acre campus, Beck Center houses two stages producing live theater for children, teens and adults; two gallery spaces, and over thirty classrooms for educational programming for children and adults. It offers classes in visual arts, music, theater and dance.

The Beck Center was originally named the “Guild of the Masques” when it was founded by Richard Kay in 1929; formally incorporating as the Lakewood Little Theatre in 1933. The group moved onto its current site in Lakewood, Ohio in a theater originally designed for the movies, the Lucier, in 1938. They redesigned the interior space for live plays and purchased the building in 1943. In the following decades, the group bought up contiguous land, and, in 1972 began a capital campaign to build a new center. They were successful in raising $600,000 which was matched by ad exec Kenneth C. Beck and the current Beck Center was built in 1975.[1]

Beck Center for the Arts hosts the longest running youth theater program in the United States, running for nearly sixty years.